Monthly Archives: June 2007

Jun292007

Am I a Nerd or a Geek?

Wired.com has a short interview with Patton Oswalt, who voices the lead rat in the new Pixar film, Ratatouille. Oswalt, whom you may recognize from the TV sitcom The King of Queens, is a self-proclaimed geek who is proud of the fact that his midlife crisis consists of taking up Dungeons and Dragons instead of buying a sports car. I like how he differentiates between nerds and geeks:

A lot of nerds aren’t aware they’re nerds. A geek has thrown his hands up to the universe and gone, “I speak Klingon — who am I fooling? You win! I’m just gonna openly like what I like.” Geeks tend to be a little happier with themselves.

Based on his definition of the term, I think I’ve finally reached the geek stage. During the past ten years, it seems like I’ve been constantly debating non-geeks and even fellow fanboys over the things that matter to me — for example, you can search this blog for my entries on Battlestar Galactica and read the comment-war I had with a detractor of the original series — and I’ve finally reached the point where I’m sick of feeling like I have to defend the stuff I love. I love the crap that I love. I admit it, and I’m not so worried about trying to justify it anymore.

Patton is right: I feel much better now…

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Jun282007

Transformers? Meh.

Am I the only thirtysomething fanboy type in the country who couldn’t care less about the new Transformers movie opening tomorrow next week? Seriously, I can hardly hear my own typing over the sound of all that saliva pouring into keyboards all across the blogosphere. Wired.com has published no less than three articles and a photo gallery; Boing Boing has already posted a point-counterpoint review entry; and my good friend Steve is alternately doing the Snoopy dance over the concept of photo-realistic Autobots and fulminating against the fact that notorious crap-master Michael Bay directed the film.

Me, I just don’t get the fuss. I watched the old cartoon show and found it entertaining enough, and I also think its way cool that Peter Cullen — the voice actor who played heroic Optimus Prime on the old cartoon — was asked to reprise the role for this new movie. But I never owned a Transformer toy, I never saw the 1986 animated Transformers movie, and the previews for this new version leave me absolutely cold. I guess I’m just a couple years too old for this particular pop-cultural touchstone to have affected me… and for some reason, that bothers me. I don’t know why…

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Jun282007

TV Title Sequences: Airwolf

Let’s do another one, shall we?

As the decade of the ’80s progressed, TV action heroes began to evolve from detectives into characters we can call, for lack of a better word, “troubleshooters.” These guys were less concerned with figuring out whodunnit mysteries than with helping the downtrodden find justice. Like the private dicks they descended from, these characters were mavericks and renegades who operated outside the law, occasionally working for shadowy organizations whose exact nature was never disclosed, but just as often functioning as “indepedent contractors.” The good-hearted mercenaries who composed The A-Team are one example of these troubleshooter characters; the world’s ultimate tinkerer MacGyver is another. But the ones I really grooved on — naturally — were the ones that threw some science-fiction hardware into the mix. Knight Rider is probably the best known of these. Personally, I much preferred heavily armed, supersonic-capable, computerized stealth helicopters to silly talking cars:


I hear this theme music in my head everytime I see a helicopter, especially if it’s just in the process of powering up and lifting off. Of course, the fact that our local AirMed choppers are the same Bell 222 model used to protray the Airwolf probably has something to do with that…

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Jun282007

TV Title Sequences: Riptide

Today’s title sequence is actually a suggestion sent along by Chenopup; it’s the opening from another of those early ’80s detective shows we all loved so much, a Stephen J. Cannell series called Riptide. I’ve got to be honest, I don’t remember this one very well. I know I watched it, and I seem to recall that the three leads had all served together in Vietnam (not that there’s anything unique about that; all the early-80s TV detectives were ‘Nam vets). I believe at least one of them lived on the boat that gave the show its name, too, but I’m not sure and the Wikipedia entry for the show is unclear on this point. In any event, it’s an enjoyable title sequence and another good Mike Post/Pete Carpenter theme song (although it loses a couple of points in my book for sounding so much like the Simon & Simon theme):

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Jun272007

Morning Dose of Awesomeness

Scalzi points the way this morning to what he calls “the coolest picture you’ll see today”, and I’ve got to agree: it’s amazing. It’s a shot that was taken back in 2003 by the Mars Global Surveyor space probe, in orbit around the Red Planet. Click here, then click the photo for maximum bigness. You’ll see the half-phase Earth and moon at the top of the photo; scroll all the way to the bottom and you’ll see Jupiter and three of its moons. That’s the third and fifth planets of our system seen in the same frame, photographed from the fourth planet. And the photo has a high-enough resolution that both planets are easily identifiable, even by a non-astronomer type. With a little digital massaging, you can even tell which hemisphere of our world was turned toward the camera. Beautiful…

If you’re interested in the technical details, go here. But whatever you do, have a look at the photo…

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Jun262007

iPrecious

Man, the crap just keeps on coming today! Hope Cranky Robert is around, especially for this next item:

Swear on the iPrecious!

I myself seem to be immune to the allure of this particular device — I can’t help but think of how greasy and icky that nifty touch interface will get after you hold it up to your face to make a call on a really hot day — but I know some people around my place of employment who are salivating like Pavlov’s infamous pooch.

As usual, click the pic for a better view…

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Jun262007

The Stupid Spoiled Whore is Out

Sorry for the crass title, but that episode of South Park so perfectly encapsulated Paris Hilton’s low character in that one vulgar phrase that I have a difficult time thinking of her in any other terms.

Anyhow, I’ve been trying to work up the dudgeon to comment on the media circus that accompanied her release from jail last night — you’d have thought it was the biggest damn movie premiere in the history of moving pictures, the way EntertainmentExtraAccessTonight was so breathlessly talking about it — but I just can’t seem to summon the words I need to adequately convey my disgust with the media, with the SSW’s stupid fanbase for idolizing this vacuous waste of protoplasm, and even with my own inability to leave this story alone while being fully aware that I’m giving the little twit exactly what she craves: attention. (oh, the hurtful prick of irony!) So I’ll borrow someone else’s observations instead, and let them stand in as reasonably close facsimiles of my own thoughts:

Phil Spector is on trial for murder but nobody notices. The newspapers have been filled with reports that Paris served more time than 80 percent of people accused of similar crimes. They fail to take into account that Paris was pulled over three times. That she was swerving. That she had a signed statement saying she knew she was not allowed to drive. That she failed to show up to mandatory classes. The judges have discretion in these cases for a reason. Paris had flagrantly flouted the law. Several days ago she called Barbara Walters at 2 in the morning, 11 at night West Coast time. Nobody seems to think that’s strange. A call to Barbara Walters at 11 at night from a prison cell.
The jail holds 2,200 people. It is full to capacity. There are only eight medical beds. Paris has occupied one of them almost the entire time.

 

…we shudder and complain about the attention Paris Hilton gets but we talk about her just the same, sometimes in quiet and disparaging tones. We talk about her more than we talk about Iraq and often we talk about how we talk about Paris Hilton when we should be talking about the war in Iraq.

 

But we don’t.

Food for thought, kids. That’s all I’m sayin’…

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